I know it doesn’t help in making this article any more credible, but I would like to start by pointing out one fact: I am a finicky person! I am hard to please in certain arenas, and as a result, I have flipped from one work place to the next in a scatter-gun fashion. This kind of behaviour is commonplace in the context of ESL teaching in South Korea, and I find that the “business” of education that I feel so passionate about is in a desperate state of affairs. Maintaining my zeal and passion is difficult at times, and this is the most feasible excuse I can muster, for someone who has stuck with her feeble career in the same industry for a couple of years now…

In Korea, we have long surpassed the moment in which teaching and learning itself was manipulated into a business model, as with anything else in this capitalist society. I wonder sometimes where I can find those teachers with untainted enthusiasm and in turn, a willingness to feed the curiosity of students. In the same fashion: how on earth can we find the students who are eager to learn for the sake of learning? This is extremely difficult in this Korean age, an age in which people believe wholeheartedly that proficiency test scores and certification degrees somehow equate to knowledge. Quite frankly, they do not!

Education. I know it sounds cheesy, but some of the lectures I have seen over the internet or been to in person (with regards to education), have made my heart flutter, my eyes tear up, and my head nauseous. All of a sudden I have been enthused with a sense of passion and determination. The sheer realization that education has so much to offer the underprivileged, to those less fortunate, to the miserable, and yet, the helping hand remains tightly cramped into a very dirty pocket.

I was not cut out for the teaching profession, I can say this for sure, and even now I am skeptical as to whether my classroom techniques are good enough. Nevertheless, my decision to take up this trade, in this educational setting, has got me this far down the road in terms of financial security and personal interest in linguistics.

So here I am, still having faith in the power of learning, rather naively. I have to say though, that the career I have built so far has proven to be quite contradictory to my ideals. Let me be blunt: English teaching in Korea in general, is not teaching. It should be categorized separately and thus dealt with in a cautious and precise manner. If real teaching were to take place in this country, from my experience, it would be met with antagonistic complaints from mums and the students. These people are the ultimate customers after all. In this arena, three types of teaching exist:

a. Teaching English in Korean (focusing primarily on school grammar – drilling the test skills and instilling them into a student’s brain, and hence guaranteeing the attainment of high marks on the exam. This means that he or she can apply to a better school than his or her neighbour. That folks, is the meaning of life here in South Korea.

b. Teaching English in English by a Native Speaker or by a so-called gyopo.

c. Teaching English in both languages (which can wind up being somewhat haphazard when misguided by the principal of the school).

At first, the English teaching industry sprung out of a need to boost the students’ exam grades. Later on, this was combined with a national desire to shorten global communication barriers, and therefore resulting in a hatchet job of trials and errors. Whatever the case may be, one ambiguous question prevails: why can Koreans still not speak English!

Why can’t they, when they pour an infinite amount of dollars into this business and draw in tremendous amounts of English speakers into the market? Why can’t they, when they pump the vocabulary books for days and days on end and attain high test scores? ESL in Korea is a genuinely lucrative business and that cannot be disputed. In actual fact: it is one of the most popular business platforms in the land, a land in which you can pretty much get paid as much as you want depending on your qualifications. It’s time to face the facts, education in Korea has been raped of its original purpose and spirit. I have to ask the question, where is the customer satisfaction and where is the end result? I am sure that any native teacher who has taught in my country could not have helped but notice the amount of youngsters suffering at the hands of this system. So, all in all, the customers are facing severe psychological pain for a particularly expensive service. What the hell is this, masochism?

I have seen students pushed to the brink of insanity, literally, writhing in class, shaking their feet or hands uncontrollably at times. There is a mental disorder that is airborne here in Korea, and the root cause is English language acquisition. It would be classified as a psychological disorder, but then again: my country does not even recognize those does it?

The only hope is for those investors in this industry to relinquish their privileges and take a time out in the corner to think deeply about the future of this next generation. We can only hope.